In my relatively long life I have tried to learn five different foreign (non-English) languages:
- Spanish - I grew up in Southern California, so I was surrounded by Spanish. I took a year in Junior High, another year in High School and two years at university. After all that; zilch. I’ve never had a conversation with anyone in Spanish.
- Chuukese (Trukese) - I went into the Peace Corps right after university and spent three months in training. That included intensive language study five days a week, four hours a day. Once again, a big fat zero. The only two things I could ever say were, “Happy Turtle” and “Please pass the salt”. Neither phrase ever came in handy.
- Chamorro - I lived on Saipan for 26 years. Chamorro is the language spoken by every indigenous person. (Some also speak Carolinian which is much like Chuukese - see above.) I heard spoken Chamorro every day. I studied books. I watched videos. I never could understand or speak even a tiny bit of Chamorro.
- Japanese - Beginning in the 1980s I started visiting Japan quite often. I decided to learn some Japanese. I bought books. I watched video tapes. I learned to read the Japanese syllabaries - Katakana and Hiragana. I learned about 200 Kanji (Chinese) characters. I figured out how to use a Japanese dictionary. I can get by as a tourist in Japan; read a simple menu, decipher signs, etc. But, I never got to the point where I could converse in Japanese.
- Thai - In the 1990s I started visiting Thailand regularly; mostly to scuba dive but also to see the country and it’s neighbors. I decided to study Thai. Another bust. I moved permanently to Thailand in 2005. I have been through dozens and dozens of books and learning systems. I learned the Thai alphabet and how to read. But, to this day, after spending thousands of dollars and thousands of hours, I understand almost nothing that I hear and my pronunciation is so bad that pretty much no one understands anything that I say.
This is the story of my adventure with the Thai language.
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